


Government Property

by stories11



Category: Spies Are Forever - Talkfine/Tin Can Brothers
Genre: M/M, These are mostly focused on Curt as we have all established by now I have FeelingsTM about Curt Mega
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-15
Updated: 2018-10-15
Packaged: 2019-08-02 11:52:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 4,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16304684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stories11/pseuds/stories11
Summary: A collection of drabbles written either for fun or resulting from a prompt given to me on tumblr. They are all meant to be taken as separate works unless otherwise noted, therefore there is no real continuity. These were just written for my own amusement.





	1. What You Cannot Touch

**Author's Note:**

> Tatiana asks "What does it mean to love something that you cannot touch"

     Fingers comb through his hair as he sighs. _Why would you want to know?_  It’s the first question that comes to mind. The simple answer is that it means pain. Needless and endless and hopeless. but it’s not that simple. It’s a winding strand of a story that comes to an abrupt end so suddenly that you spend the rest of eternity looking for the lost volumes of it. It’s watching the world through a thick pane of frosted glass, seeing the motion but lacking the tactile sensation.

     Standing, he walks a few steps away, pulls a decanter from a cabinet pressed to the wall, and then a glass. He’d offer her a drink if it wasn’t whiskey, if he didn’t believe she might be slightly insulted that it isn’t vodka. He has some of that in the freezer, maybe he should go get it. But he’s getting away from the question at hand. Maybe that’s the point of it. Silently, he pours a double, and a heavy handed one at that, swirls it around the glass before he glances over to her, and back at the glass. How to answer the unanswerable.

     "It’s like nothing at all." A deeper response than it might seem on the surface. He lifts the alcohol to his lips and sips the burning liquid before he moves back to his seat, clutching the glass like a life line, which is to say, he’s hardly gripping at all these days. Throat clears "…It’s the absence of them that kills you. It’s being in the middle of the desert and realizing your canteen is dry… trying to take a shot and realizing you’re out of bullets. You don’t realize there’s nothing there until you’re suddenly desperate and nothing else will suffice… and then you suffer Because it never stops."

     With that, he finishes the glass, stands again. He’s getting another.


	2. Scar Tissue

Few would deign to consider Curt in all his bold manuevers and lack of mindfulness to be a cautious type. Even less would be able to imagine him as gentle. Calloused fingertips are stained with blood, they are not meant for kindness— they are meant to be rough and angry and aggressive. Always breaking and bending— but not now. In this moment they trace up the length of Owen’s torso, slowly stripping away the fabric to expose the familiar skin. Every inch, every scar, screams of familiarity. If he leaves his palm there, over the older man's chest, he tells himself he would feel some sort of heartbeat, but he knows better than that. The british agent is too stoic to be betrayed by such petty things as that.

He kisses him, guides him back towards the bed, savoring in this rare sweetness. It’s always frantic, and angry, or rushed to completion before one of them has to be on their way. Dalliances tainted with sweat and blood and adrenaline. It’s not often that they have the luxury of taking their time and Curt means to make the most of it. A secret sentimentalist, who would have thought? A long, languid kiss. They have time to enjoy this. Hands roam over the expanse of skin that he knows too well, rough fingertips brushing over the heart, then down.

An unfamiliar ridge is exposed, a few inches below. He knows every scar by touch, but not this one. This is uncharted, and it feels wrong. Too close to his heart. Their profession is not one for the faint. It lacks security in anything, even life, but he can’t help the flashes of worry and anger that rise to just below the surface demanding answers. Still, his knees settle to either side of Owen’s waist, and their lips part, only long enough for the american to remove his own shirt in a swift motion that’s too well practiced— too many others have seen the same sight. The scattering of scars across his own chest that are hidden from view as he leans back down, interlocks his fingers with the older agent’s and pins his hands to the bed as his mouth trails a series of burning kisses down his jaw, his neck.

Purposed in this, he is blazing a trail towards the unfamiliar flesh. He pauses when he finds it. A stab wound surely, but what sort of weapon would cause this? What blade? What hand? His eyes flicker upwards to meet Owen’s before he lowers his mouth to press an almost reverent kiss to the offending flesh. A silent promise that he will protect him, but they both know better than that. They’re spies and promises are meant to be broken.


	3. Say My Name

Anonymity is the backbone of Curt's existence. Likewise, it has become the connecting thread between affairs and trysts, even those that are continuing. So few of his lovers have known his true name, and he their own. Spies and civilians alike, they play with fire. Every time lips lock it’s like flint being struck mere inches from tinder. They are always risking burns, perhaps that’s the fun of it. The names are interchangeable, the faces, the hands, the mouths— instruments unto each other, no one gets hurt when the wrong name is called because the point of it is never identity. It’s meant to be forgettable, not in experience, but in singularity. A forgotten falsehood is far more useful than a remembered truth.

     With Owen Carvour, he tries to tell himself that the same rules apply. That the memories sunk into his flesh, the discoloration of skin and soreness, are no more important to him than any other. With the older’s lips on his neck, his hands on his hips, he tries to imagine another— any other— to replace his existence, but the face remains stubborn and stalwart in his mind. Eyes close, he breathes out a bit harder than intended, and he can feel the mouth moving.

     He tries to focus on the parts themselves, and not the whole. A mouth  **(** Owen’s mouth **)**  any mouth. Hands  **(** Owen’s hands **)**  any hands. Pressure, dizzying, unrelenting, it won’t let him go. Curt’s jaw falls open, trembling slightly as he resists the urge to pull him closer or push him away. Fingers dig into the wall behind him, and he’s acutely aware of every inch of skin that’s touching the wall. When had his shirt come off? He can’t remember, or maybe he’s choosing not to as the hands  **(** Owen’s hands **)**   move up to his waist and there’s nothing stopping the skin from touching. The force with which he has to stop the gasp at the sudden coolness of them touching him is shocking to say the least. The sharpness is still there though, maybe his partner knows him too well because the lips  **(** Owen’s lips **)**  are at his ear and a command is whispered and he’s never wanted to listen to something more in his life.

     "Say my name like it's the only one that's ever been on your lips."

     "—Owen." It’s an easy task to acquiesce. Saying his name stops him from making a sound less becoming. Saying his name takes the place of a desperate, pleading sound. It’s a name that rips the mask off of the carefully built anonymity. Saying his name like it’s the only one that’s ever been held in the cavern of his mouth is easy because it’s the only one that has. The only real name. The only one that he’s terrified to admit matters. and like a cavern should, it echoes the sound again. "Owen— Owen,  _please_."

     Eyes don’t need to be open to see the smirk in his mind’s eye. To feel it, like he can feel the hunger rolling off of him. He wonders if Owen can feel the need as viscerally as he does that ache. It’s taking over every part of him and breaths shorten to gasps as the mouth  **(** Owen’s mouth **)** and hands  **(** Owen’s hands **)**  move lower.


	4. Fallen from Grace

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Please be warned of suicidal thoughts being present in this drabble.

     It's strange for a man so oriented to touch to feel his skin crawl at contact which feels uncomfortably intimate for its simplicity. It isn’t Tatiana’s fault— it’s not the touch itself and he knows it. It’s vulnerability. It’s the fact that they lie to themselves and say it somehow gets better in time when in reality, there is only numbing of the pain. When he had so suddenly left the agency, he hadn’t considered the ramifications. The backlash. How many account mysteriously froze, and how many of his safe houses were destroyed under suspicious circumstances? His name itself is under question and every false identity he’s ever crafted gone up in flames.

     Even old contacts, people he’d considered to be friends disappeared in the aftermath. When he left, he thought he had cut his strings, that he would find legs beneath him and the strength to carry on. Instead he found himself falling from grace, lying on the ground with shattered spine weeping for the wings he once held. He may not be the smartest man at times, but he knows what this is meant to do. Drive him to one of two ends with the kinder being returning to the agency on his bloodied hands and knees, begging at Cynthia’s feet for the return of his position and maybe, just maybe— she would consider. He doesn’t want to think about the other option. It comes unbidden into his mind too often.

     Body remains stiff, the hug is returned quite awkwardly even as her head rests on his shoulder. It’s a role reversal, and yet his voice is still softer than it usually is. Fighting to hide the emotions, the pain behind the words

      "They’re not gonna stop, Tatiana. we both know they won’t… I don’t even have my own name— they’re backing me into a corner. How am i supposed to stop hurting when they’ve got me backed into a corner? They’re trying to force me back in or—" He cuts himself off, reconsiders and recollects, his voice is a bit more torn and ragged when he speaks again. "They’re trying to force me back in… but I don't want to go back."


	5. Domesticity

      "If you ask me to, I will set the whole world on fire. My dear, it's all for you."

     It's romantic in a way. Not in that it inspires feelings of lust or love, but in the skew it places on the truth of reality. They may be spies and deal in secrets so often that they forget the truth, but even they are not so blind to believe that. What’s muttered in moments of passion is hardly a reliable measure to hold their world views against. An amused sort of smile paints itself across his lips. What a charming delusion they build for themselves in these moments.

     A thoughtful pause to ruminate on the words, the deepest meaning when the frills are stripped away. I would kill for you. That much he already knew— but it’s only a sparse few letters from I would kill you. A statement he doesn’t find too far fetched to be true. Even in these carefully constructed daydreams, he cannot lose sight of the fact that the man between his sheets is a killer, and a ruthless one at that. There is not a single doubt in his mind that if the British agent received a mission that labeled him a target, he would be bleeding out on the floor in seconds.

     The apartment looks lived in after three months as a base of operations, it feels closer to home than a hotel room now. No need for a flask because he has a bottle and a glass on a table across the room. It’s warm, and there’s the brief consideration of leaving for ice, but the view is too pleasant. Almost domestic, barring the fact they’d both be committed or more likely killed if anyone found out about this.

  
     Leaning against the wall, he’s clad only in boxers, Owen he suspects is in less, but the sheets obscure the view. A welcome sacrifice for the distance. The british agent is beautiful to observe, a masterpiece marred by any number of weapons and scrapes with death. He knows them all like he knows his own heartbeat. In knowing that though, he’s well aware of the poison on his tongue and in his blood. Intoxicating as he may be, he’s deadly and tainted with the blood of too many countless others. He could never in good conscience ask for more corpses to be added to the pile without good reason.

  
     "So you'd kill for me?" His voice is light, teasing almost with a wide grin. This is the least put together Curt Mega will ever look. Even in hospital rooms and on drinking binges he somehow manages to rally some semblance of being collected. This is Curt at his most human. Letting down the guards and facades of what the world intends him to be, with messy hair, unshaven stubble, and a crooked yet honest grin. Very few ever see this side of him. The side that for a moment stops pretending. He eyes the dark haired man in his bed and continues.  "Killing is easy— same with dying. Anyone can do it if they try hard enough… but —"

  
     Drink is taken off his whiskey, swirled around his mouth before he swallows it. The american agent sets the glass down on the table, looking at it for a moment before he crosses his arms atop his bare chest and looks back at the other with a mischievous sort of look in his eye. Back to that ever teasing tone. "Living is hard. Surviving actually takes work— so tell me, Owen— would you survive for me? Stay alive just to spite me? Or would you die to piss me off? ❜


	6. And The World Spins On

     It’s impossible to be lonely when you’re never fully alone. and it’s not the dogs. Dakota and Murphy are elsewhere in the apartment that never ceases to amaze him how it can feel so expansive and yet so claustrophobic in the same breath. It’s the way that the ghosts of his past won’t stay buried, not even after two funerals. Not after the fall. Not after putting a bullet in Owen's head.

     "If you don't miss me, then why am I still here, Curt?" Smug tone, even more smug expression. Forever self satisfied.

     He knows better than to swing at him. It will pass straight through and crash into the wall and perhaps for two seconds the shockwave of pain will make him disappear as the physical sensation overrides his diseased mind. It would be worth it if not for the sharp sting that would follow when he reappeared in the moments after while he dusted the broken drywall off of his hand. Perhaps it will be the brief moment of kindness, the ones that make him feel like he’s truly losing his sanity, but it will more likely be barbed words and cruel taunts. The things that make him feel more real.

    Of course he brings up a good point— and he has to remind himself rather sharply that talking to imaginary friends is only considering acceptable as a child. But no one ever talks about the imaginary enemies. The imaginary lovers. The imaginary echoes of reality that follow close behind and stretch to inhuman heights like a shadow when the sun is low in the sky. The question begs an answer, one that he must already know, and thus Owen must know in turn but the apartment is too quiet for the rattling thoughts. "Because you won’t stay in the ground? Spies never die after all… "

     It’s a dry sort of humor and he scratches at the scruff that’s accumulated beneath his chin in the weeks since his departure from the CIA. There are papers and files scattered around the room from various sources on a number of confirmed Chimera agents and those he suspects, and he has to sidestep a large pile of files yet to be sorted to cross the room. The untrained eye might think that he’s going for the makeshift bar ( and it’s atrue  temptation)  but instead he walks to the record player, sifts through the small stack of records. Most of them aren’t his, Angelica’s left behind collection has become his own. Elvis had never quite been his style, but it had been hers. He flips a record over in his hands and he doesn’t have to check the tracks to know where to place the needle.

     " _Love me tender… love me sweet… never let me go… you have made my life complete and i love you so…"_   He doesn’t look at the hallucination as he sings softly under his breath. This was never a song he liked, a song he understood, but it had been one of her favorites. There’s a part of him that says he’s playing it to get a rise out of Owen because the one he knew would never stand for this but he knows that he’s not real. " _Love me tender… love me true… all my dreams fulfilled… for  my  darling… I love you… and I always will…"_  

     In that moment he swears he can feel arms wrap around him, a phantom weight rested against him lacking the warmth of life. Another voice joining the harmony and the light sway with the slow rhythm of the record. " _Love me tender… love me long… take me to your heart… for it’s there that I belong… and we’ll never part…"_  There’s a piece of him that wants Owen to act angry and irrational, but he’s remembering the moments that don’t belong to them. Wrapping his arms around his then fiancee in a similar way and singing into her ear. If he wasn’t acutely aware of the fact that there are no real arms wrapped around him. Even now he can hear echoes of his former partner singing this same song. He tells himself he chose it to anger him, but maybe it was to remember. " _Love me tender… love me sweet… all my dreams fulfilled... for my darling… I love you… and I always will…_   _love me tender… love me dear… tell me you are mine… l'Il be yours through all the years... till the end of time…"_

     The apartment is so very still, so quiet save for the faint voices of two men that sound like three to his desperate ears. For all the hatred he wants to insist, for all that he wants to say he doesn’t miss him, that he can’t, he remembers moments like these. Moments that aren’t theirs and never were, but could have been. in another life, another world. Somewhere else beyond the capacity of reality they’re both so very alive and slow dancing to a vinyl track. No one looks because no one cares. Maybe in that other life they could’ve been happy. Maybe in that other life there’s no bandaging on his shoulder and his lover isn’t shot dead by his hand on foreign soil. Maybe in another life theirs aren’t so full of destruction and the remains of other people’s unfinished business. Fingertips rest on the edge of the record player, feeling the shuddering vibrations of it as the song slowly comes to its inevitable conclusion. " _Love me tender… love me sweet… all my dreams fulfilled... for my darling… I love you… and I always will…"_

     Desperately, he wants to be touched in a visceral way, in the absence of that, he craves a drink.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The alternative name for this chapter is "If you think that Curt Mega who canonically hallucinated Owen after his fall during the Russian affair and exhibits so many symptoms of C-PTSD throughout the show that it hurts does not continue to have horrifying hallucinations of him after the show, you personally owe me an apology." I don't make the rules here.


	7. Special Talent

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An alternate universe in which Owen was apprehended, not shot.

     "You should see me as a threat. I will tear down everything you know until there is nothing left of you. I am a walking threat."

     An eye roll won’t suffice as his head tips back with a scoff of utter disdain. It’s so very like Owen to put on airs like this, even now. He looks at the man across the table and questions what happened to him. Prison aside, of course. The ever sleek and elegant agent is disheveled in appearance, with his hair long and and sporting an untamed beard. At curt’s behest, he had been disallowed visits to the barber. The chances of him managing to get his hands on something sharp was too great. After putting his cellmate into critical condition, they finally began listening. The condition in which Owen is kept may be considered cruel, and inhumane, but he is considered dead by the world at large. Officially there is no record of him in the system, in his place is the name of another dead man who’s identity has been altered to fit.

     "I know you broke your spine during the fall, but it takes some serious _talent_ to  go on sucking your own dick like that— you might want to watch the  _teeth_." He leans back with a smug expression, feeling no small amount of pleasure in knowing the other man can do little to him aside from speak. He’s prepared himself for that. Really he has few reasons to visit these days save for spite, and gloating. He had won, in the end, and it made him feel invincible in knowing that. Curt feels no fear in leaning forward, to look him in the eye with a sneer that reveals his missing tooth has been replaced with a porcelain counterpart. "From what I understand, you don’t get to walk much of anywhere these days. You live in a ten by ten concrete box. Alone. You might think you’re big and bad and scary still, but you’re the only one that does. No one else gives a shit, how’s that factor into your whole plan to destroy me? hmm? So much for being a  _walking threat_."


	8. Sanctimonious Bullshit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A snippet of the final conversation. A final plea.

     "I'm not the person you left behind anymore. There's no one left to miss."

     Standing on the landing of the staircase, his gun is raised, they’re locked in a standoff, and the odds of either of them walking away grows slimmer by the minute. It’s only fitting that they end where their story ended before. A momentary glance and he can only see the jutting slabs of concrete and rebar where moonlight has pooled as it spills in through the cracks and holes in the battered roof. Even now the rubble seems ready to shake and shatter, perpetually on the verge of finishing the job had begun years prior. His wrist twitches as something cold and familiar rolls down the column of his spine. Guilt, regret, defensiveness in tandem as his head clouds in the fractions of a moment that his eyes leave Owen.

     Snap back to reality, to looking at the face of the lover he left to die those years ago. a stab in the gut. in the heart. "You say that like I had a choice. You would have done the same thing— but you wouldn’t have tried to come back. You’re exactly who I left behind. A torturer **,**  a liar **,**  a monster… This was never about the good of theworlditwasaboutus. Can you just drop the sanctimonious bullshit and  _try_  toact like you have some fragment of humanity left inyou? You can be a good man. You can change. Maybe you weren’t good before, but you could be. Starting now… just putdownthegun and you can start." he deserves an oscar for that. they both know better, but he has to **try**.


	9. Morbid Curiosity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An alternate universe where Owen won. Also could be called Torture Tango pt. 2

     "Morbid curiosity is a wonderful way to describe how I feel about you."

     Heaving breaths escape his battered lungs in shallow blood spattered gasps. There is no part of him that doesn’t ache. He exercises no control over the blood that pours out of him, or the muscles that will no longer cooperate, If Owen were to remove the circulation cutting restraints, open the door, and stand aside, he would rather pathetically be unable to reach freedom under his own power. The only thing he still has a lasting grip on is his voice. He’s refused to scream. The last bit of will he’s managed to cling to with white knuckles, he won’t allow the bastard that small piece of himself no matter the cost.

     Trying to look at the brit, his vision is doubled and blurry as the blood trickles down from the torn skin beside his eye, a cracked socket has left the eye swollen and the crack in his jaw makes it hang half open in an attempt to alleviate the pain that radiates through it. He holds little allusion that he’ll make it out of this alive, and if by any means he does, he won’t be in tact. His body sags against the concrete and the rough surface and tears the broken skin, but he has become numb to the pain in its constant state. The comment however elicits a strange sound.

     A broken laugh, disturbed and edging on hysterical rips through the air. It burns, but it is pain he brings at his own expense, this pain won’t last long, that much he’s certain of, if not at Owen’s hands than his own. He has plans, he’s seen the cracks in the design and he isn’t afraid to use them to his advantage. This could go on for years, if Owen didn’t get bored first. "I could have… guessed that… from the torture… but hey… if it… gets you off… who am I… to judge...?"

     Aggressively, in spite of him, he smiles through his split lip with blood spilling down his chin. Ehe teeth are cracked and coated in crimson from the constant abuse. It is menacing and manic, the look of a man who has lost his mind, but Curt can find no solace for he still retains his mind. He simply aims to unnerve, not that Owen is an easy target for that. "Is this… what it takes now…? We really… should have settled… on a safe word… How about… treason…? That’s a good one… bet you can’t… make me use it... Can’t even… make me scream… anymore…"


	10. Mercy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another alternate reality in which Owen won. Perhaps the crueler outcome of the two.

     "I am becoming everything we always dreamed of and I am leaving you behind."

     "You don't have to do this, Owen." If the tone makes him sound pathetic, it’s because he is. Kneeling in the rubble left on the landing, he let Owen get too close. Forgotten how much of a threat he can be even without a weapon. Soon he’d been disarmed himself, and at a disadvantage from four years losing the physique he once prided himself on so greatly, he was overpowered. Some might call it a mercy that Curt’s former partner didn’t proceed to shoot him with his own gun. Whether immediately granting death or leaving him to die in the place the american had once done the same as a sort of poetic justice— but that would have been kinder than this. Chained to the metal railing on the wall by his own handcuffs, he might get out of them, but he’s more likely to die of dehydration first. This is cruelty. This is quiet vengeance, but even as he rattles the binds, he tries to plead with him for anything resembling mercy. tries to appeal to the man he once knew.

     "You were a good man… you could be a good man again. This isn’t what you fought for. What  _we_  fought for. I’m sorry— I tried to come back for you. Don’t do this. You didn’t deserve this. Any of what I did to you… Owen— I loved you." He’s shouting these pleas to a man he’s not sure is listening, but he has to try. He wants to believe everything he’s saying, and some part of him truly does want to believe that somehow they can get back to what was lost all those years ago. What went careening over the edge of the landing along with Owen. The poor bastard had deserved better than that. He tries to see through the dark, but the attempts are fruitless, the only light illuminating the staircase the moonlight through the cracks in the broken ceiling. It’s only fitting he dies amid the wash of destruction that he caused, while the world ends beyond the forgotten walls of the facility. "Owen, please…"

     It’s such a strange, and sad sound to come from the mouth of the once great agent. A quiet, broken plea for mercy.


End file.
